Many women used to be coy about revealing their ages. I thought that had all but disappeared until I heard about the curious case of JoAnne Good.

She implied that an Argus report giving her age as 45 was wrong but didn't reveal the correct figure.

The inference listeners to her BBC Southern Counties Radio Brighton breakfast show were supposed to draw was that she was younger than that.

But we reported her as being 30 in1986, which would make 45 about right.

Intriguingly I had a message from a reader, irritated at her vagueness, who said categorically she was 47.

It's hard to see what advantage there is to keeping her age a mystery.

After all, she played the Fairy Godmother rather than the principal boy in pantomime at the Theatre Royal and, by all accounts, did it rather well.

She keeps up an exhausting six-day-a-week schedule on the radio station with few holidays and maintains her acting.

There will come a time when she is proud of her age like some of the old women I meet on buses who hoist themselves on board and slump into the nearest seats, announcing breathlessly: "I'm 78, you know", as if fellow passengers should all burst into applause.

In some professions you are ancient beyond belief at 45, such as being a professional footballer.

In others, such as politics, you are young. Tony Blair, at that age, was the youngest premier of the century while William Hague, who has just turned 40, is often depicted by cartoonists as a baby.

It is the youthfulness of the middle-aged and elderly that has changed immensely in the last 50 years.

When I started reporting, seeing a centenarian was an event and the crone in question was usually senile.

Now they are so lively that when I said oleaginously to one that I hoped I would see her next year, she looked me up and down, eventually barking: "I don't see why not. You seem fit enough to me."

On my first paper we often used to refer to people in their late 50s as elderly.

No editor would dream of allowing that now and I have had people over 70 bridle at any suggestion they are old.

I know of one fit pensioner who swam round the Palace Pier on New Year's Day at the age of 75 and heard recently of a Greek man who completed his first marathon at the age of 98.

It is a point of interest in a story that a notorious bank robber is 18 or that a 70-year-old man has climbed Everest.

But in the past, many more people were shy about their ages.

I remember in the Seventies a report suggested the abolition of aldermen on the perfectly reasonable grounds that many were decrepit time-servers.

My former colleague, John Marley, was deputed by the Argus to ask all 19 ancient aldermen on Brighton Council how old they were.

Knowing many might refuse, he hit on a brilliant wheeze to extract the information. To the recalcitrant, he murmured: "If you don't tell me, I'll put in the paper how old I think you are." He received a reply from every one.

I have no intention of being ungallant or otherwise to say how old I think JoAnne Good might be.

But I will offer her this consolation.

She is certainly not as old as me and if I dropped dead today at the age of 58, the paper would probably record that I had died young.